Re: ./pre-inst-env guix build dangerous inside an environment?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Wiktor,

> While developing my first package definition to be contributed to GNU
> Guix, I followed 14.1 („Building from Git”) and 14.2 („Running
> Guix Before It Is Installed”) of the manual.
>
> 14.1 suggests using a Guix environment via `guix environment guix`. I
> thought it would be even better to do `guix environment --pure guix`,
> and thus obtain some higher level of isolation.

How did you configure Guix?  This sounds like perhaps you ran
“./configure” without “--localstatedir=/var”, so that Guix would be
using a different location for its database and thus consider existing
stuff in /gnu to be invalid.

This is not a problem with using an environment.  The problem is with
using a Guix that is misconfigured so that it considers /gnu to be
“polluted” and cleans it up according to the fresh database that is
found at the default localstatedir (which is not /var).

--
Ricardo